ABSTRACT
The Visible Human Project is, it seems, a work of desire as well as an advance in technique. In the previous chapter I conjectured that various kinds of desire could be discerned in its production and circulation. In its excessive visuality the project is symptomatic of medicine’s much proclaimed scopophilia1 and its utterly repressed pleasure in pornographic orders of representation (Kapsalis 1997). As perfectly co-operative image-objects the VHP figures make their exhaustively visualised bodies available for all forms of display and optical penetration, without recalcitrance or resistance. In its claim to invent vital icons the project is symptomatic of IatroGenic desire, a desire which circulates at large in the fin-de-millennium biomedical imaginary, and which is directed towards the mastery of corporeal matter and vitality along the lines of the commodity and the mechanically reproducible invention. IatroGenic desire thus works to compensate for the uncertainty of any relation between embodiment and technology, its excess to any human project. It works through a refusal to acknowledge the constitutive absence of mastery implied in this relationship, the failure of technology to fully serve human interests and human ends. The VHP is a device of IatroGenic desire precisely because it presents the spectacle of a fantasised mastery over matter, a mastery which is always deferred, promised in the future.
